Heritage Project Museum Season Review
Wigan Athletic Heritage Project wants to look back on and celebrate our first year inside the Blue Room with a look back at everything that we have manage to achieve in this amazing space.
The museum opened on the first day of the season against Northampton Town on the 2nd of August were welcomed the public in to see our new collection and displays for the first time. There was a hopeful buzz amongst many supporters looking forward to the coming season and they brought that atmosphere into the museum to make it a vibrant and positive place, which was a great start to our season. Over August and September, we continued to open and provide supporters a place to explore, learn and reminisce about the history of the club whilst we iterated and improved upon the museum and its displays. In that time we took part in Heritage Open Days festival, which is ran by the National Trust to help bring people together to celebrate heritage, community and history, all for free. To endorse this Wigan Athletic Community Trust ran a free ticket intiative in partnership with the Heritage Project to help get fans down to the stadium for free and attend the museum beforehand where they could collect their tickets. This was a huge success with over 250 visitors at the museum and over 100 tickets being claimed, many attending a Wigan match for the first time.
We celebrated our "Official Opening" in October. You can find more about that special day that saw over 300 visitors, ex-players and club staff attend here.
In the background, our connections with the club and the Community Trust continued to expand and with that came our inclusion in the club "From classroom to kick-off" initiative. This initiative would see the club offer visits and school experience days to every school in the Wigan Borough, with the museum being included in the experience day as part of the carousel of activities. This season alone has seen 26 schools and 1400 children particpate in the experience days and attend from other session. These have mainly been ran by the Community Trust but since January our chair, Jordan Burns, has also been attending and leading these sessions which include a scavanger hunt style quiz around the museum where children work in groups to find all 5 answers, before they dive deeper into these answers as a class. The end of every session includes talking about the FA Cup and Wigan's famous win in 2013, this concludes with a participant being chosen to wear a Wigan FA Cup shirt and being our "FA Cup winner" who gets to hold both a tinfoil trophy, and as a surprise, the real FA Cup club replica trophy.
As the season has progressed our volunteer knowledge and expertise has increased thanks to training from staff at the Community Trust, organised trips to Liverpool Life Museum and the National Football Museum and archive, and feedback given from visitors at the museum. This has led to the displays, content and stories being shown by the museum to be changed or developed further which has kept the museum feeling fresh and has shown our evolution as a volunteer group and collections managers. All of this has cumulated into an immersive, extensive and informative experience where all ages can find something to excite them whilst also increasing their knowledge of our wonderful club and it's history.
To finish off our season review, the Heritage Project would like to extend a massive thank you to everyone who has visited on a matchday, attended one of our social sessions or events, took part in the school experience day and all those who have volunteered and helped develop our growing museum and we look forward to showing off a potential new look, new displays, stories and memorabilia on every match day next year, school trips, social sessions and, hopefully, more new and special community days.
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